Finding Wisdom at the Library

by Bill Peak

When asked why he chose his particular field of study, labor historian
E. P. Thompson, making reference to a long-forgotten 18th century
craft, famously answered, “To rescue the poor stockingers.”
University of Pittsburgh historian Marcus Rediker might have given a
similar reply, though the people he rescues from oblivion in “The
Slave Ship” are the African men, women, and children who were both
victims and heroes of the trade that helped build (among other jewels
in civilization's crown) England's Treasure Houses, Jamaica's
Kingston, and Rhode Island's Providence.

Of course “The Slave Ship” isn't going to make anyone's short list of
good beach books. Reading about the ease with which fine upstanding
“Christian” citizens—representatives of an age we still call “the
Enlightenment”—could unhesitatingly murder, torture, rape, and enslave
the innocent inhabitants of an Edenic world is, well, unsettling. And
yet, I will admit it here, I had trouble putting the book down. I
would like to think that this was because Rediker's work is so well
researched and evocative. “The Slave Ship” fleshes out and clothes a
time and a global enterprise that I had thought beyond the reach of
history. And fleshing out this time and enterprise, it makes clear
the contradictions in our Western world that would have allowed such
an unseemly practice to take place. “The Slave Ship” is one of those
rare books—like Jared Diamond's “Guns, Germs, and Steel”—that will
utterly change your view of the world.

But I think scholarly interest as an explanation lets me off rather
too easily. Though I wanted to believe the pleasure I took in reading
“The Slave Ship” purely academic, my conscience kept insisting
otherwise. History sets us at such a safe distance, doesn't it, from
the object of its study? And then, of course, it gives us 20-20
vision. Again and again, reading “The Slave Ship,” I found myself
indulging in the guilty pleasure of judging its villains, of asking
myself, smugly, how they could have been so wicked, how could anyone
have been so blind to the evil they were committing.

Yet I am the same fellow who just read this year's One Maryland One
Book, “The Distance Between Us,” which should have taught me how, in
our own time and age, the arbitrary borders erected between nations
rich and poor (to protect, among others, my own interests) daily
degrade and abuse innocent lives. Two years ago, once again as part
of One Maryland One Book, I read “The Cellist of Sarajevo,” which
should have taught me how the love I feel for my country, taken to an
extreme, could turn me, could turn anyone, into a monster. At a time
when it is considered acceptable—when I have considered it
acceptable—to bomb enemy-held towns and call the deaths of innocent
men, women, and children “collateral damage,” one wonders how future
generations will judge us. Will they someday read a book like “The
Distance Between Us” or “The Cellist of Sarajevo” and smugly ask
themselves how Bill Peak could have been so wicked, how he could have
been so blind to the evils committed in his name?

That, of course, is the problem with reading: it forces us to
re-examine our view of the world. It threatens us with wisdom.

And so I unhesitatingly recommend to your attention “The Slave Ship,”
now available for check-out at the Talbot County Free Library. It
will disturb you. It will inform you. And it will take you one large
step further along that journey we begin every day toward being more
fully alive, more fully human. I wish you bon voyage.